Free Space

by Scott Bartlett

  His mistrust may be well-placed. The fact Candle had turned down his own command, twice now, hadn’t escaped her. And his brown-nosing could be an attempt to justify those decisions—playing the fawning second-in-command, awestruck by his CO and unable to bear the thought of leaving his side.

  It made her dredge up her memory of first hiring Candle, almost three years ago now. His last employer had given him a glowing recommendation, she remembered. They were a small but professional private military outfit with a focus on merchant escort.

  Something struck her, then. They operate out of Candor, don’t they? The same region Sunder Incorporated had its HQ. That was almost certainly a coincidence, but it had never occurred to her before, so she filed it away for future scrutiny.

  “You might be right,” Thatcher conceded to Candle after a pregnant pause. “Degenerate Empire is clearly gearing up for something, so maybe the few scows they sent with Pegg’s ships were all they’re willing to commit to dealing with us. Sending what’s left of Reardon might even have been a way of forcing Pegg to prove himself, after he failed the pirates in Dupliss. Either way, if we leave them alone, for now, they may well leave us alone.” Thatcher sniffed. “That doesn’t mean we should drop our guard, for a second. But maybe we have some breathing room.”

  Thatcher’s comm lit up from the tabletop in front of him, and his mouth quirked downward as he snatched it to his ear. “Thatcher.”

  He listened for a few seconds. “Are there any vessels? Of any sort?”

  Another silence as the person on the other end spoke.

  “Very well, Ortega. Take us to Recept, and have Guerrero share our course with her counterparts aboard the other ships.” Thatcher ended the call and replaced the comm on the table, his air somehow more businesslike than before. His eyes roved around the room, meeting each of their gazes in turn, even the captains on holoscreens. When his eyes fell on Rose, a tingle ran up her spine, and she willed it away, repressing a grimace at her wayward emotions.

  “We’ve reached Ucalegon, and we’re heading for Recept now,” Thatcher said. Recept was the only planet in the system with an atmosphere that was breathable by humans for any length of time. Since the Xanthic seemed to thrive in similar atmospheres, the destination made sense. “Ortega says there are no signs of any other craft in-system, which means no Xanthic ships. Unless they’re in hiding—and the system’s asteroid belt does offer ample opportunity for that. Either way, we will proceed with utmost caution. Major Avery, I want you to prepare to mobilize the Jersey’s entire marine company. Captain Sho, I would request that you do the same with your marines. Commander Paulson, Captain Grieg…I’ll need yours, too.”

  The captains of the Lancer and Georgia nodded.

  Rose drew a breath. “I intend to accompany Major Avery to Recept’s surface.”

  Fourteen pairs of eyes turned toward her, many of them widened with surprise and dismay.

  Her statement had made Thatcher stiffen even more than before, and he was the first to break the silence. “Ms. Rose, Major Avery has told me that the last time you deployed with the marines, you were almost hurt. I must strongly recommend that as CEO of this company, you stay out of danger.”

  Her cheeks burned with immediate indignation. “You’re out of line, Commander.”

  Thatcher blinked, lips pressing together.

  “I decide who deploys and who doesn’t. You work with what forces I give you. The time to make your ‘recommendation’ was back in Freedom System, not now. There’s no safe place in this region. Not even aboard the New Jersey. I will accompany the major down to the planet.”

  No one objected, this time. None of them, aside from Thatcher, would have dared.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Planet Recept

  Ucalegon System, Lacuna Region

  Earth Year 2290

  “Two minutes to touchdown.” The pilot’s voice played from a helmet speaker near Rose’s right ear. “Hope you enjoyed flying with Attack Shuttle Two.”

  The marine across from Rose smiled at the joke, and their eyes met through their face plates. Rose conjured a smile from somewhere deep inside, though she wasn’t sure where. As comprehensive as the training was that her father had made her undergo, she’d never quite acquired a marine’s ability to crack jokes in the face of death.

  Then again, there didn’t seem to be much threat of death in Ucalegon System. Not yet, anyway. Part of her had expected to find the place crawling with ships similar to those that had attacked Earth Local Space fifty years ago…except, well, fifty years more advanced.

  But so far, there was nothing. She used the last minute or so of the descent to call up the planet’s topography on her HUD, enlarging it so that it blocked out her vision, which wouldn’t matter while she was strapped to her crash seat.

  Except, as a staging planet for an attack, Recept had almost zero value. It had just one continent, roughly half the size of Australia, along with a string of useless islands that extended a quarter of the way across the globe, like debris from a comet’s tail.

  Barren desert made up most of what little land there was. The breathable atmosphere came mostly from an ocean full of bacteria, with scant shrubbery and cactus-like plants pitching in from the land. According to samples taken fifteen years ago by one of the many corporate exploratory teams that had combed the Dawn Cluster since its discovery, the planet’s crust contained little in the way of useful metals. At least, nothing worth the price of hauling out of the gravity well.

  Are we wrong? Did the map we found mean nothing at all? Even as a staging ground for an attack, Ucalegon was fairly out of the way—almost at the end of one of the Cluster’s longest dead ends. Why not choose a more central location, where the Xanthic could hit several regions at once?

  For the same reason Degenerate Empire chose Lacuna to get their footing. It’s easier to defend a single choke point.

  She nodded to herself. Now was not the time to allow doubt to seed her thoughts. That could come if a thorough search of the planet found nothing.

  Besides, she didn’t truly expect Recept to be empty. The adrenaline coursing through her veins gave that away—along with the pounding headache born from staying this stressed for this long.

  Her body expected a fight. And I’ve just been trying to distract myself from that.

  She tapped at her suit’s wrist controls, getting rid of the topographical map to stare into space and focus on her breathing. A calming exercise from her father came back to her.

  Clean air through the top of your head. Feel it cleanse your mind.

  Now, exhale your fear.

  With a jolt, she realized they’d landed. Marines were filing past her, some of them glancing her way as they headed for the airlock. She fumbled with her crash seat straps, trying to ignore the sweat trickling down the side of her head.

  You’re fine, she told herself.

  Outside the shuttle’s airlock, she found the marines forming up in preparation for descending the enormous canyon which Thatcher had suggested as the first place to check. Wider and deeper than the Grand one back on Earth, the canyon was visible from space, and if the Xanthic had built one of their deep underground colonies on Recept, then starting from the canyon’s bottom would have saved them kilometers of tunneling.

  Problem was, the canyon stretched for over seven-hundred kilometers. The shuttles had brought them to the spot that orbital analysis said was the deepest.

  She noticed a power-armored figure fifty meters or so away, who appeared to be looking directly at her as twelve more shuttles floated down from the sky, wings extended and curved at the tips.

  Tapping at her wrist once more she had her helmet magnify him:

  Avery.

  He hadn’t spoken to her since the meeting in the Jersey’s conference room. If she didn’t know better, she’d say the marine commander was upset with her.

  She doubted he would dare raise the specter of her returning to orbit. Not after she’d told That
cher he was out of line. But it wasn’t hard to tell he didn’t like her being down here.

  Is that really out of fear for my safety? Or something else? She felt ninety percent certain Avery was trustworthy, but his behavior would have roused her suspicion in another man.

  One of the shuttles Kibishii had sent to Recept’s surface was filled mostly with dinner plate-sized recon drones, which fired from a chute near the shuttle’s aft in a blurred stream of metal before they separated and whirred off in different directions. Most of them disappeared inside the canyon’s gaping mouth.

  Avery was approaching her now, his footfalls sending up little puffs of yellow-orange dust. Rose felt her spine stiffen, but apparently he hadn’t come to question her. “I wanted your input, Ms. Rose.” There was only about half the awkward tension in his voice that she’d expected. “We have a choice. Deploy into the canyon now and start searching, or wait until the drones come up with something.”

  “It’s your decision, Major.” Long years of schmoozing had given her the ability to keep her voice level, even when she felt off-balance. “I made you the Jersey’s marine company commander for a reason. And that puts you in charge of this mission.”

  He nodded. “It’s a lot of responsibility. I’m not trying to shrug any of it off, but I’m new, ma’am. I’d appreciate your thoughts.”

  All around them, marines milled about. Looking over weapons. Calibrating their suits’ sensors, tactile feedback, shocks. Checking fuel and coolant levels.

  Within minutes, they’d be ready to go. Yes, she could keep them up here waiting, for long hours in the desert heat, until the drones found a cave that looked like it might lead to a Xanthic colony. Wasting their suits’ energy to keep them cool.

  The advantage of that would be that they wouldn’t have to climb back out of the canyon if the Xanthic colony entrance turned out to be hundreds of kilometers away from their location.

  But right now the mission had momentum, momentum which would shrivel and die if she made them languish here for hours in the desert dryness.

  “Let’s go down now. If we have to come back up and pile back into the shuttles, so be it.”

  That brought another nod, this one a little more confident. “That’s what I was thinking.”

  He turned and began giving the necessary orders, allotting five minutes for the marines to finish their preparations. Then, with the necessary equipment strapped to their suits, they began dropping over the canyon’s sides.

  The canyon walls were fairly friendly to this sort of descent, with plenty of ledges that jutted out to provide little landing zones.

  Rose was one of the first over the side, probably to Avery’s dismay. But her taking the lead wasn’t just for the benefit of the marines on this mission, though that was part of it. It was also the message it would send to the Cluster as a whole. Here was the CEO of a significant corp, leading from the front to protect every human in the Dawn Cluster from a possible Xanthic offensive, no matter their nationality or affiliation. If this was spun right, it could serve both her goals and Thatcher’s: to further unite the Cluster, and make it stable. Safe.

  They were descending at the canyon’s deepest spot, with walls that stretched for twenty-five hundred vertical meters. She found she could make most jumps without any aid other than the power suit’s shocks, which perfectly distributed each impact across her suit’s exterior, with only a small jolt reaching her body.

  But for jumps over seventy-five meters, her power suit’s range finder sent an alert to her HUD, advising her to engage aerospike thrusters for the last dozen meters or so. Over a hundred meters, and it didn’t let her choose. The thrusters engaged all by themselves, firing from the suit’s ankles and wrists at angles calculated by the suit’s AI to stabilize her landing.

  At a hundred and fifty meters, training and protocol required her to use the suit’s rappelling function. A compact launcher built into the right arm sent a hook drilling into the rock of the cliff face, and tiny explosions in each of the hook’s arms rotated it, setting it firmly.

  Rappelling down that far sent her stomach toward her esophagus, though it was as much thrilling as it was unsettling. When she reached the next ledge, the hook retracted its arms, then propelled itself from the rock with another controlled explosion, flinging itself into the air and down into the canyon, to be reeled in automatically by her suit.

  Halfway down, she paused at the edge of the widest ledge yet, which stretched at least a hundred feet out from the cliff face. She turned to watch the host of marines descending toward her.

  A smile curled her lips, and for the first time she actually started to feel good about this mission. In places, the cliff itself seemed to move with the sheer number of marines swarming down it. With Frontier and Kibishii forces combined, a total of four-hundred and fifty marines had been deployed to Recept’s surface.

  It took her twenty minutes to descend the mammoth alien canyon—a time she was proud of, although she’d been passed by dozens of marines on the way down.

  At the bottom, Avery was already organizing his forces away from the rock face, leaving plenty of room for more marines to land. When he saw she was down, he trotted toward her after speaking with an officer for a few moments—probably ordering him to take over marshaling the troops.

  “We’re in luck, Ms. Rose. Seems our hunch about deploying to the canyon’s deepest part was on-point. The drones have found the entrance, just over three kilometers to the north.”

  She scrunched her nose before answering, wishing she could wipe sweat away from her eyes with the back of her hand. The descent had flooded her system with enough adrenaline to make an elephant dance. “You’re sure it’s not a natural formation?” She tapped at her wrist interface, turning on the air nozzle pointing down her face in an attempt to evaporate some of the moisture there.

  Avery shook his head. “Definitely not. Too uniform. It’s big enough to accommodate plenty of Xanthic traffic. I think you were right, ma’am. We’re seeing every sign of a major presence here.”

  And yet no ships in orbit. Or any signs of the Xanthic on the surface. “I’ve seen naturally occurring caves that look pretty uniform.”

  “Oh. I forgot to mention.” He tapped at his own wrist, and a second later images began hitting her HUD, one by one.

  “Check out the tunnel’s walls. Their marbled surface, and their coloration. They’ve been treated in exactly the same way the tunnels on Oasis were. The Xanthic are here, ma’am.”

  Rose drew a steadying breath. “Okay. We head north as soon as the last marines are down.”

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Planet Recept

  Ucalegon System, Lacuna Region

  Earth Year 2290

  With power suits amplifying their every movement, it took the entire host of marines less than six minutes to jog to the colony entrance in formation, with Avery and Rose near the front.

  Two squads accompanied them into the cave mouth, deploying down the tunnel ahead of them, checking for hostiles.

  A couple meters in, Rose ran her glove over the tunnel wall. Its tactile feedback was sophisticated enough that she might as well have been using her bare hand.

  Avery was right. “This is exactly what we encountered on Oasis. But where are the Xanthic?”

  The question hung between them in the air. If this was an important colony for them, why wasn’t there anyone guarding the entrance?

  Back on Oasis, finding the Xanthic colony empty had made at least some sense. She’d figured they simply committed everything they had to the attack. That left out the lack of Xanthic young, but it at least served as an explanation, if a half-formed one.

  But here…it made no sense.

  “Maybe they want to lure us in.” Behind his faceplate, Avery’s amber eyes were solemn. “Trap us. We don’t know how far down this thing goes. How maze-like it gets. If they attack us out here, there’s a decent chance we could retreat if needed. But in there…a flank could be devast
ating.”

  “As we descend, I want a pair of marines left at every intersection, each with a comm. We’ll leave pairs at regular intervals, even if there is no intersection. I want comms daisy-chained the whole way down. That way, we can maintain contact with the Jersey if need be. And we’ll have warning if the Xanthic do try to outflank us.”

  Avery nodded. “It’ll be done, Ms. Rose.”

  With that, they started through the Xanthic colony. Avery insisted on deploying two full platoons of marines ahead of them, and Rose allowed it. She’d learned from her headlong rush into enemy territory, during their counterattack on Oasis. There was a difference between leading from the front and needlessly placing your life on the line.

  They don’t give medals to corporate soldiers, her father told her from the back of her mind. So there’s no need to act like you’re trying to earn one.

  She and Avery walked side-by-side, identical assault rifles pointing at the ground, held in loose grips. Just like the last colony they’d infiltrated together, this one sloped gradually downward for several kilometers before suddenly dropping sharply.

  Before long, they found themselves setting up ropes for the marines to rappel down each near-vertical incline, one at a time. The Xanthic must have evolved a way to climb and descend these things. Maybe those tentacles of theirs stick to the treated surfaces.

  That sounded kind of gross in her head, but then again she wouldn’t mind growing a sticky tentacle or two just then, if only for the climb down.

  The minutes stretched into hours as they descended, their numbers dwindling as more and more marines remained behind to watch for a Xanthic sneak attack.

  In ways, the descent down the network of almost vertical tunnels was proving more arduous than the journey down the canyon’s cliff had been. Even with the suit augmenting her strength, and its cooling systems on bust, Rose still felt covered in sweat. Then, the sweat began to itch. She longed to scratch her arms, her stomach, her cheeks. As amazing an innovation as the power suits were, they still hadn’t solved everything.